


But One Man Loved The Pilgrim Soul In You.

by Lanna Michaels (lannamichaels)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Author's Favorite, Quotes William Butler Yeats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-23
Updated: 2008-03-23
Packaged: 2017-10-03 03:13:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lannamichaels/pseuds/Lanna%20Michaels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto has never believed in luck. If he survives this, he'll start.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But One Man Loved The Pilgrim Soul In You.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats. This was written for the [winding road icon](http://i195.photobucket.com/albums/z214/peahenironybath/springs/001i-llum.jpg) prompt by lienne at the [Love-A-Thon 2008](http://community.livejournal.com/lucyjanesparlor/20823.html) at lucyjanesparlor.

After all the endless speculation at Torchwood London about Captain Jack Harkness, it's a disappointment to meet the man. He's as much of a flirt as rumored, but he's not the walking wet dream of his advertisements. He's too slick, too polished, and there's something off about the way his face moves. Ianto once watched a nature video of hammerhead sharks and they fit Jack too well for comfort.

Still, he's here for a purpose, Ianto reminds himself every time Jack brushes his shoulder, and he leans in and smiles, and he lets Jack kiss him. Really, this is too easy. He'd feel guilty, but then he remembers the way Torchwood Cardiff had ignored his screams from the caved-in rubble, picking their way through mortar and blood for all the alien tech they could scavenge, while ignoring everything else, and his nails dig into his palms from the effort of not killing the lot of them.

He doesn't need them, but Lisa does, and so he stays, and when he kisses Jack, he tells himself, it's not because he likes it.

\---

He learned to make coffee the way he learned how to read people: at his mother's knee. Jack likes coffee in the morning and afternoon, tea in the evening, and he has no moral compass whatsoever. Ianto watches him toy with his pistol, twirling it around his hand, as he takes a conference call with world leaders, and Captain Jack Harkness leans in and is the perfect mimic.

The second time he sees Jack do it, Ianto catalogues it as a survival mechanism, and wonders from what reality Torchwood dug up this American Captain. Fifty-first century, Jack had said, and Ianto is starting to believe it. It's a simple application of Occam's razor, and Ianto is nothing if not logical.

They go out hunting, just the two of them, Jack testing him out in the field. Jack brings him back captured aliens of all types and watches Ianto deal with them, sees how he takes challenge after challenge. Ianto trails Jack around the city, learns his habits, moves Lisa in when he knows he will not be disturbed. It doesn't take Jack very long to ask him, "what else did you scavenge from London?" and Ianto gives him enough to keep him satisfied and then never mentions it again. He's already learned all he wants about how little Jack cares.

After a week, Ianto finds himself thinking with a pang that it's a shame Jack Harkness and his survival mechanisms had fallen into the hands of Torchwood. Because for all that Jack has publicly repudiated Torchwood London, he would have fit in perfectly there. Sometimes it's like the Daleks and the Doctor never blew the roof off Torchwood Tower.

Ianto knows the new line in his file is a lie. He is still surviving the battle of Canary Wharf.

\---

Moving back to Cardiff means lunch with his father on Sundays, and Ianto asks for suits. He tells his father he wants to make a good impression. He tells his father he's grown up. He doesn't tell his father that he'll be damned if he goes into this battle as poorly armed as he was for the last one.

\---

It is horrifically easy to sexually manipulate Captain Jack Harkness. Ianto wishes he had been able to hack himself more permissions before it all went to shit, but he remembers the psych profile he'd skimmed, remembers the language they used to talk around the monster that was the head of Torchwood Three. It's enough.

Jack doesn't trust his sexual partners any more than he trusts anyone, but he expects certain things from them. There are certain actions that fit the profile of People Who Have Been Bedded By Jack Harkness. They come in all shapes, sizes, and forms, but certain characteristics define them. Ianto acts infatuated, starry-eyed, but sadly cynical.

It is disturbingly easy to pretend to be lovesick over Jack Harkness.

\---

Torchwood has completely ruined Ianto for a normal life. That was what came of working in an environment where the relevant drug paraphernalia was on how to not accidentally retcon yourself back to infancy, where the occupational hazards ran the gamut of prehistoric beasts to megalomaniacal ghosts, and where it was perfectly normal to fetch coffee one moment and subdue a weevil the next. Ianto hasn't had a normal life since he was nineteen and doesn't miss it.

On her third day on the job, Gwen tries to start a bar game in the SUV. Ianto listens on the comm while Owen ridicules her. The next day, Jack sings showtunes as they speed through Cardiff, and Ianto finds himself humming as he disposes of the bodies.

\---

Jack Harkness is a control freak. He keeps exact records and holds his team to exacting standards. Ianto had planned for Jack getting under his skin, but he hadn't expected to start feeling like a traitor to his own body, hadn't expected to apologize over and over to Lisa while she was sleeping for what he had done and what he wanted to do, had never expected any of this, up to and including Jack calling over his shoulder, pulling down his shirtsleeves again after giving him a handjob in his office, "you should eat more pineapple."

He doesn't fit in here and he doesn't belong, and Jack treats him like a pet, and somehow, it's all going wrong. It's all going horribly wrong.

\---

Ianto's mother died when he was twenty-one. The psychiatrist told him to keep a diary of his feelings. The first thing Ianto ever wrote in it: _She's not dead. I still see her every day._

Ianto actually liked the ghosts. The fact that they tried to kill him doesn't change the fact that they let him say goodbye.

\---

Lisa died at Canary Wharf. Ianto _knows_ this. It simply never mattered.

Jack holds him down, all those muscles working for one purpose and one purpose only, and Ianto struggles back up against him, and Jack's screaming at him, and Ianto can't even muster up the satisfaction of finally making the great Captain lose his composure, can't even gloat over having even this small measure of revenge, because Jack's telling him that he's human and that he's forgiven and that if he ever pulls shit like that again he's getting shoved through a black hole ass first.

Ianto is too tired to try to hate him for it.

\---

He can't remember what he did during his suspension. His diary says he went to the cinema. His diary says he bought new sheets. His diary has had five pages torn out of it and there is blood on the spine.

He finds himself missing Suzie even more. She'd been the only one to ask him about London, had very nearly apologized for leaving them all to die. It was more than Owen ever did.

Suzie is still dead, Lisa's body's been burnt, and Ianto has no idea why he's still here. He supposes inertia is as good an excuse as any.

Ianto writes in his diary later: The only downside to not getting eaten by cannibals is letting the entirety of Torchwood Three see me cry.

\---

One thing Ianto wiped from his file after the battle: his total recall is Torchwood Cardiff's fault. He was six and it was a bad dose of retcon. Ianto is listed in the archives under his birth name, marked for later recruitment.

Later, Ianto checks the signature on the original paperwork, and spends five days glaring at Jack Harkness, who doesn't bother to notice.

\---

There's a satisfaction in this. Jack's stuck in the past and it would break all of Torchwood protocol to bring him back. It could, quite literally, destroy the world. It's a choice between their leader and their world, and Ianto knows the correct answer to this. It was drilled into him during basic training, along with sharpshooting and the finer points of discretion. No one's life is worth more than the sum of human achievement. No one.

It should feel like victory, but it tastes like Canary Wharf all over again. Ianto shoots Owen like he shot the Cyberman converting Lisa, and it doesn't solve anything.

\---

Ianto survived Cybermen. Ianto survived Daleks. Ianto survived the Doctor. Ianto survived weevil attacks and psychotic aliens and gunshot wounds and hallucinated ex-girlfriends and everything the Cardiff rift has to throw at him.

It takes Jack Harkness laid out in the morgue to break his heart.

\---

Ianto stays up four nights in a row trying to decide if knowing that Jack left with the Doctor makes it better or worse. The change in the Doctor's status from enemy number one to alert-Jack-immediately was just another change from Torchwood London to Torchwood Cardiff and Ianto hadn't given it much thought at the time. Had he, he would have assumed that Jack had learned from the destruction and decided to take a risk on a Time Lord.

He watches the security camera footage over and over again, staring at Jack's boots pounding the pavement as he chases after the police box, watches as Jack disappears into thin air, and wonders if this is madness or if this is love.

\---

When Ianto was fourteen, he stole a diamond ring and gave it to his mother for her birthday.

That was not his shoplifting conviction.

That came later, at seventeen, and now, at twenty-four, Ianto spends a sleepless night cleaning his police record instead of watching the endless loop of Jack running away from him.

\---

When Jack comes back, it's as if he never left, but the calendar feels all wrong, and the part of Ianto's mind that got him out of Canary Wharf unscathed is screaming at him that there is more going on. There are more lines around Jack's eyes than there were three months ago and he carries himself as if he expects to die at any moment.

Owen gives Jack a check-up, per standard procedure, and declares him fit for duty. Later, Owen pulls the three of them to the side and says, "this is completely impossible, of course, but it's him, so maybe not. If he were anyone else, I'd say he just gained back a significant amount of weight _very_ quickly, but I'm fucked if he doesn't look same as always. Ianto, figure this out, will you?"

Jack's back, so of course Ianto is in his bed. Of course.

He'd resent the assumption, but Jack had hired him for the sole purpose of having him over his desk. It would be a shame to ruin their track record now, when Ianto's been aching for it for _(a year)_ months now.

 

\---

When Jack comes back, consensus is that some things must change. Owen and Gwen take a united and vocal front, leaving Tosh to form a silent resistance. The assumption is that Ianto's loyalties can't be trusted, forced to choose between his returned lover and his newly-dear friends. Jack says nothing about it, but Ianto catches his eye and Jack nods and Ianto knows there was never any doubt in Jack's mind that Ianto would come back to him.

One thing that changes immediately: Jack stops keeping it behind closed doors.

\---

He was fucking the man for a year and a half before Jack took him out for a proper date. They went out for sushi and Jack told stories that probably weren't true, and over coffee, Ianto caught Jack staring at him, eyes vacant, and knew that wherever Jack had gone, it wasn't some place he wanted to remember.

"There was a woman," Jack says like he's telling Ianto where he parked the van. "Middle of her class at school, no one thought she was very smart. Always in the background, constantly unnoticed, unappreciated, and under the radar. No one paid her much thought. And she--she very nearly destroyed the world."

And that was all Jack said about it for eight years.

\---

Ianto does not believe in: guilt, god, morality, shame, or letting Jack fuck him on a bed. He sees no reason to pretend to be normal.

\---

Like all good little Torchwood London employees, Ianto's had the basics of psychic training. It's not a lot, but it's enough to let him know that while the flowers on Tosh's desk are from Owen, they're not from the Owen he knows, and that letting Tosh keep them would be dangerous and infinitely stupid.

Ianto takes them home with him and watches them die. There's an itch at the back of his mind that he doesn't try to scratch. Instead, he hunts through his diary, and laughs at the marginal comments and little frowny faces Jack scrawled through every mention Ianto had of Jack's penis.

Ianto writes a note and sticks it on Jack's monitor. _If you want to put the record straight, keep your own bloody record._

\---

Among the people Ianto has dreamed of killing, Owen Harper is at the top of the list. But there's no joy in how it happened. It was so senseless. Doctor Owen Harper is supposed to die in a hail of gunfire in the line of duty, not shot by someone who has just lost everything he loves.

The thought haunts him. Ianto takes his first day off and drives to London to say goodbye.

When he comes back, Owen is still walking around. Ianto can hear the universe laughing at him.

\---

Ianto still has the engagement ring he never gave Lisa. He kept it, for a time, with his cufflinks, and then moved it to his DVD collection and for two months kept it in his pocket at all times. Jack finds it one night while looking for the milk, and for once in his life, doesn't make a snide remark about emotions or twenty-first century stereotypes or even not managing to let go of a woman who tried to kill you.

Instead, he tells Ianto, melt it down, make a necklace, make cufflinks, just _change it_, so you can keep her close while you move on, so you don't go out of your head.

The next day, Jack leaves his wedding photos where Ianto can find them, and Ianto thinks fondly of the days when he could fool himself that Jack didn't care.

\---

It's strange, the way epiphanies come to you when you're dying. You don't get a chance to act on them.

Ianto has never believed in luck. If he survives this, he'll start.


End file.
